WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

As you can see by the numbers on Sabal Trail’s current map,
even at the other stations it is shipping less than half (393)
of its currently stated capacity (813).
At Reunion, even the capacity is lower (711), and the amount shipped (Nom)
is a sixth of that. Continue reading →

As we’ve seen so often in the Sabal Trail docket,
Spectra seems to be acting in place of FERC,
responding yesterday to thousands of comments
on FERC’s certificate rulemaking.

Spectra’s bottom line: a pipeline company’s bottom line matters more
than the Fifth Amendment due process, or water, air, or safety.
See page 25:

Contrary to some commenters’ arguments, the Commission’s public
interest determinations are not rendered insufficient under the
Fifth Amendment public use requirement because the Commission
considers precedent agreements among applicants and affiliates to be
evidence of public benefits.

Spectra repeatedly argues that
FERC does not have authority to consider hardly anything other than
whether the pipeline company has customers, yet FERC has authority to give eminent domain to private corporations and to let them gouge through our lands and under our rivers without local agreement or payment first.

In this election year, you can ask every candidate for statehouse
or Congress whether they support Continue reading →

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Neither the builders of the fracked gas
Sabal Trail Pipeline nor the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
(FERC) will ask the Supreme Court to review a landmark ruling by the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from last
year. That decision required FERC to consider the effects of
downstream greenhouse gases when deciding whether to approve
proposed pipelines that transport gas.

In response, Sierra Club Staff Attorney Elly Benson released the
following statement:

Elly Benson, Sierra Club Staff Attorney

“We are glad to see FERC accept its responsibility to consider
greenhouse gas emissions from burning transported gas at downstream
power plants. These dirty, dangerous, and unnecessary pipelines pose
a threat to our communities and climate. They should not be
proposed, much less built, at a time when clean, renewable energy
sources are abundant and affordable. We will continue to monitor the
pipeline permitting process to ensure the law is followed.”

FERC just let slip the wolves of sun and wind
by enabling the storage
that those sunny twenty-first-century
“aggregated distributed energy resources” (DER)
will use to blow down the straw houses of
traditional twentieth-century so-called baseload capacity
coal, oil, and nuclear power plants.

The 515-mile pipeline snakes from Alabama to central Florida, and
when it’s running, it brings natural gas (mined using the process of
fracking) to power plants in the Sunshine State, where it generates
energy that power companies sell to customers. The $3.5 billion
project is a joint venture between Enbridge, NextEra Energy and Duke
Energy Corporation, which make up the group Sabal Trail LLC.

Desperately seeking loopholes, at 4:58 PM today on a Friday,
Sabal Trail claimed “Applicants would face irreparable financial harm,”
which is pretty rich for the company that stuck the Bell Brothers with
$47,000 in Sabal Trail legal fees
for fighting eminent domain from that same FERC certificate
the DC Circuit Court is likely to void next week.

It wants to “avoid the irreparable impacts of a system shutdown,”
says the company that destroyed world-record-holding
soybean farmer Randy Dowdy’s soybean fields.
As Randy Dowdy said last May, and Sabal Trail’s own reports then say
they have done nothing to correct:

“We’ve got loss of production for the future that will take
not my lifetime, Continue reading →

Sabal Trail ramped up the last couple of days, to 196 thousand Dekatherms/day (MDTH/day) today.
Most of that they’re shipping out to Gulfstream at Osceola.
with a bit through FSC to FPL’s Martin County power plant,
and the rest somewhere.

Why now?
During the last cold spell, they spiked briefly in the first week of January,
but dropped back to zero while there was snow on the ground in Florida.